Should I draw a Map?

I am 12,000 words into a novel. My characters are travelling around - not epic journey style - but travelling nonetheless from city to town etc and I am anxious I am getting/going to get confused as to where certain places are in relation to each other and the distances between them.

I don't intend to have a map in the book (hah! like it will be published!)

in some ways a map can jump-start the creative process. and, as you're already finding out, it's always nice to know exactly where your guys are headed before they get there and find out they've gone somewhere else.

my own maps are less than publishable. dying spiders have better cartographic skillz.

in some ways a map can jump-start the creative process. and, as you're already finding out, it's always nice to know exactly where your guys are headed before they get there and find out they've gone somewhere else.

my own maps are less than publishable. dying spiders have better cartographic skillz.

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Thanks - Good to hear that last part particularly. I've never drawn a map before though. What's the best way to start?

Thanks, all of you. I guess I am going to have to bite the bullet on this

I will admit to drawing a fair number of maps, partly to estimate travel times, as the horse advances or the dragon flies, and partly for weather conditions; if I'm on the rainy side of a mountain, or in the rain shadow, it changes agriculture and employment for just about everybody; the trick is to do it fast enough that you don't spend all your time map (and world) creating, and forget about the writing for which it is supposed to be subservient.

I have a town plan as a table on a Word document. Yes, it's simple. I don't like maps in books - I seem obliged to keep going back and looking at them. Having drawn one myself, I now realise why so many include them - "all that work; shame to let it go to waste."

I've drawn a number of maps using the drawing painting program on Appleworks. They aren't supposed to be drawn to scale or particularly accurate (more like like early medieval maps), but they do give an idea of where everything is in relation to everywhere else.

A rain shadow is the area that lies on the downwind side of a mountain range. It's hot and dry because the mountains catch most of the rain as the clouds move across the land from the ocean. (No doubt some of our more scientifically minded friends can explain this better.) Anyway, it's one of the things you should know when mapping out your world, even if you only carry the map in your head. For instance, it tells you where your deserts are most likely to be*, and where your rain forests probably are not.

*Before someone mentions the Sahara Desert, I'll do it myself. It's bounded on the west by the ocean. Where the mountains are is only one factor in determining climate. It's actually a lot more complex.

I only drew a map of a city, and since I can't draw even as well as a dying spider I took the map of another (real) city and drew over it.

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I've done something very similar, making a very rough freehand copy -- in my case not of a city, but a large harbour area and its surrounds. That also extended into noting the contour lines for the port, to get an idea of how steeply the land rises, the distance from the open sea to the inner harbour, and the geological underpinnings of the area so I can have locally made pottery from the china clay and a kind of local marble. (I have made a note that in any Acknowledgements I have to thank the OS and Poole Harbour Commissioners!)

I've also found a real life castle, spent hours checking out various photos of it on the internet and created what I think is a floor plan of it, which I'm now using for my castle sitting above the harbour. I'm trying to persuade the other half that I really need to go and see it for real, though. (It's in Italy... )

Never drawn maps before, always kept the visualisation in my head. But I did buy a wall-sized relief map of the USA, since my characters were going to have to cross it (alternative world - no cities) which will help enormously when I get round to actually writing it...

In my wip, my hero set off on a caravan of horse and oxen-drawn wagons for a six month journey from one city to another. After a week, he diverted, and spent some time at another city before heading on to try to rejoin said caravan. I actually drew, for the first time, a map, so I could work out, semi-accurately, where he'd find them. I knew if I didn't, some reader(!) would write and tell me my calculations were absurd, so they stopped reading...

I've got at least another five Ancient cities to put in my world, so I actually thought (after checking those threads chris and others have mentioned) that I might buy Campaign Cartogropher, since the only person who'd recognise my pencil-drawn efforts would be Hex, as a kindred spirit. When I checked online, I was shocked at the prices, and it only ships from the USA, so I wandered into my local 'Game' store, to be told there were no software packages stocked by them, and suggested I try the internet..

There's a stay-at-home-job for some enterprising computer map-making whizz-kid, ripe for the taking! Read the book, write the map for me...

on maps: "Where should I start?" Without wanting to sound condescending, with a blank piece of paper. Choose one edge of the paper and just let yourself doodle a line. it will turn into a coastline. everything else comes from there, in one way or another. I find that if you think too much about it to begin with, you hamstring yourself. both the world-maps I've drawn so far started out this way. they might change along the way, but that doesn't matter. like writing, it's just important to have something on paper.

on floorplans: done much the same as TJ. i've scoured the webz for floorplans for riads, just so that i know where the titular character lives. i also needed the ancient library of Alexandria. of course, none of these will be anything like the originals when they're polished up.....

I drew a map and I was amazed by how much it actually helped. There was also a sense of pride seeing your world, your work in that form. Even if the drawing isn't the best it won't matter when you've stained it with tea and crumpled it up.

Also, if you do the malp early on, half of it'll be made up compared to the other half which you would have mentioned in your book, and this will then affect the story you tell - one days travel... with mountains in the way? - with the terrain lending to the story.